


The Art of Happiness

by PenguinofProse



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Clarke Drawing, Clarke likes to draw, F/M, Fluff, Tooth-Rotting Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-07
Updated: 2020-07-07
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:28:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,934
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25136923
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PenguinofProse/pseuds/PenguinofProse
Summary: Clarke likes drawing Bellamy's smile but he doesn't smile very much on Earth. Bellarke highlights from seasons 1-4, some canon, some invented, all with drawing and smiling. Fluff of the cheesiest kind.
Relationships: Bellamy Blake/Clarke Griffin
Comments: 22
Kudos: 121





	The Art of Happiness

**Author's Note:**

  * For [OnlyZouzou](https://archiveofourown.org/users/OnlyZouzou/gifts).



> Hello and welcome to a gratuitously fluffy story written to fulfil the prompt "Clarke likes drawing Bellamy's smile". Happy reading!

It all starts with a pencil, and with a pad of paper, crinkled with age, and with the realisation that Bellamy Blake's smiling face presents an interesting artistic challenge.

Clarke feels slightly bad about that, because it was Finn who gave her the pencil, and he presumably didn't mean for her to use it to draw another guy's face. But only very slightly bad, because she certainly didn't mean to help Finn cheat on his long-term girlfriend. She figures that, in the grand scheme of things, Finn's disloyalty is worse.

Anyway, it's not like she's hurting anyone by doing this. She's just sitting in her lonely tent, passing the time by trying to perfect the curve of Bellamy's lips on the page before her. It's not easy – there's something about the way he smiles, warm and genuine yet with a little hint of tension always tightening his jaw. It's like he doesn't know how to relax, how to let himself go and feel total joy.

She'd like to help him work on that.

Not because she cares about his happiness or anything. Just because, after a childhood spent dreaming of Earth and drawing trees and lakes and mountains, she has caught herself by surprise with the discovery that Bellamy Blake's smile is the most fascinating thing to sketch on the ground.

…...

Unity Day ought to present good opportunities to catch Bellamy smiling, Clarke decides. She ought to be on the alert, keeping a careful watch, and preserving any passing grins in her mind's eye to draw later.

They do share a smile or two, and a conversation about fun. And that's all well and good, but she doesn't know where to take it from here as he disappears back into the crowd and leaves her to gulp down moonshine and play immature drinking games.

She's almost pleased when a crisis presents itself. This is more her territory. But it offers precious few opportunities to make Bellamy smile. She gives it a try, when they are safely back at camp after the bridge. She lingers a moment, while he stares, concerned, at the state of their defences, and she has a go at introducing a lighter tone.

"Thanks for having my back." She says.

He only shrugs, still frowning.

"Not the kind of fun you had in mind, huh?" She asks, tenacious as ever.

He does acknowledge that with a grudging grin. "We survived." He offers, as if that is cause for celebration.

She nods, and flees to her tent, and stays up later than she ought. Partly because she's still in shock from what happened at the bridge, of course, and she needs a while to collect her thoughts and calm her breathing.

But largely because that grudging grin is even harder to capture on paper, it turns out, than his usual stress-tinted smile.

…...

She sits near Bellamy at the fire the following night, just across from him, angled so she has a good view in case he should end up smiling. She figures she might as well sit with him – it's not like she has a lot of other people to sit with, since the Finn and Raven situation presented itself.

It isn't until after she has sat down that she realises she has a problem. She doesn't know how to make Bellamy smile – she really struggled with that last night. She's not sure she knows how to win pretty smiles from anyone, now she comes to think about it. She never really had to try with Finn or Riley – they just happened. And it's likely to be even harder with Bellamy, and that ever-present hint of anxiety that she's beginning to suspect might be something to do with feeling responsible for a hundred teenagers, one of them his baby sister.

She tries to think back to all the conversations she's had with him. He seems to like it when she provokes a bit of an argument, when she stands up for a strong opinion, or when there is a teasing tone between them. She's aware that logical analysis of past conversations is not necessarily a very natural approach to human emotions, but in this moment, she doesn't trust herself to just go with the flow and hope for the best.

Her strategy prepared, she opens her mouth to speak.

"Who are you and what have you done with Bellamy Blake?" She asks, with what she hopes is a provocative slant to her brow.

He only frowns in response. "What do you mean?"

"I swear I just saw you giving half your food to Marius." She says, nodding in the direction of one of the youngest kids.

Bellamy frowns even more, now, looking away rather than meeting her eye. "He needs it more than me, I figured. Look at the size of him. I'm worried about whether he's going to survive the winter."

Well, now. That's unexpected. That's not a teasing smile.

Somehow, it seems, she has ended up engaging him in a conversation that has actual substance. This isn't the plan, but she decides to go with it anyway. Apart from anything else, it's a new side of Bellamy that intrigues her every bit as much as his smile.

"You really care about the young ones." She observes quietly.

"I really care about all of them." He shakes his head a little. "You're right – especially the younger ones. They remind me of O too much. And after I screwed up with Charlotte -"

"Hey. That's not your fault. That's on the Council for sending her down here in the first place."

"Thanks." He offers her a cautious twitching of his lips. "What can I help you with, Princess? What brings you here tonight?"

She shakes her head, flustered. "Nothing. I'm not here for anything. I just – tell me more about your sister."

It's a risk, but it pays off. He looks at her, brows raised, for scarcely a second before he is off, reminiscing about Octavia's childhood, telling Clarke about lily pads and scarred arms and shared rations and everything in between.

He's about five minutes into his tale when she sees it for the first time. A smile, a completely genuine one, broad and true. And relaxed, without so much as a hint of that usual tension to be seen.

…...

She misses his smile, when she's in Mount Weather. She misses everything else about him, too, more than she would ever have thought possible. She misses him far more than she ought to miss a passing acquaintance she briefly ran a camp with.

He's just a very reassuring guy to have around, she decides, as she sits cross-legged on her bunk and wonders what her next move is. His company is pretty uplifting, too, she has to admit – they shared a few chuckles and grins, more than she might have expected, given the circumstances.

Her next move isn't a useful one, in the end. She draws Bellamy. Or rather, she tries to. It's difficult, when she hasn't seen him in days.

It's even more difficult, seeing as he is missing, presumed dead.

…...

Clarke and Bellamy have a lot of important things to achieve, while they sit at the makeshift bar in Camp Jaha and try to avoid Finn and Murphy. They have to make a plan to rescue their friends, and a plan to avoid the attention of Clarke's mother while they do so.

But Clarke has something else on her mind, too. She's good at multitasking, so she thinks she gets away with it. Even as she's attempting to teach Bellamy the geography of Mount Weather with her hand-drawn map, she is trying to memorise every line of his face, every last freckle.

"Clarke?" He prompts, confusion in his eyes.

Well, then. So much for multitasking. "Sorry. Yes?"

"Have I got that right?"

"Have you got what right?"

He gives her a little exasperated smirk, so she supposes her failure is not all bad news. "The medical facility is next door to the grounder cages."

"Yeah. Yeah, that's right. So that they've got ready access to their blood supply." She mutters, upset.

"Hey. Princess. We got this, OK? We'll get them back." He reassures her, eyes kind.

It's not a smile. It's better than that.

…...

Clarke has done some stupid things in her time. But this is surely the most ill-judged of the lot.

It made sense at the time, OK? She can see now that she wasn't thinking straight, but when Lexa implied that caring about Bellamy was putting him in danger, she panicked. She's been getting too close to him recently, her feelings for him growing deeper than is really wise. And it's not just his smile she cares about these days, but his safety and his company and – well, everything about him, really.

So it made sense at the time to send him away. But now she is regretting it.

She ought to have remembered how it felt to be without him in Mount Weather, just the other week. But now she's condemned him to being trapped within that heartless mountain, and she's condemned herself to that same crushing loneliness without him.

She deals with it the only way she knows how. She draws him – smiling, always smiling. She can't bear to draw the glowering rage she knows is probably lining his face right now.

The problem is, that she has to be by the radio all the time, just in case he should call. He's supposed to check in regularly, but if he has an emergency in between check-ins, she wants to be on hand. At that makes it pretty tricky to hide her sketching.

She's been at it scarcely a day when Raven confronts her.

"I hear other people might just tell the guy they're interested." She comments, cynical as ever, brows raised and head cocked in the direction of the sketchbook.

"Like you've told Wick how you feel?" Clarke throws it back at her, voice sharp.

"That's different." Raven argues. "Me and Wick – that's new."

"I've known Bellamy less than two months." Clarke reminds her.

"Yeah. But you're not _new_ , you two. You've been heading that way from the start."

Clarke scoffs a little. Not because she's rising to Raven's confrontational idea of friendship, or anything. Just because she cannot for the life of her get the placement of Bellamy's scar quite right.

She needs to be able to see his face. She'd give anything to see his face, right now.

"He'll be fine, Clarke." Raven continues, more softly, as if hearing her thoughts. "You know he's a survivor. When he gets home, maybe tell him about this?" She waves an arm in a gesture that encapsulates Clarke and the sketching and the hovering by the radio, all in one fell swoop.

Clarke nods, but mostly because she wants Raven to leave her alone. She can't imagine a world in which she tells Bellamy about any of this. That would mean admitting how much she cares, and she can't entirely convince herself that it would be a good idea to do that.

…...

Clarke realises how much Bellamy cares about her – or _cared_ about her – in the worst possible way. She realises it because he is furious at her for leaving, because he is lost without her, and because he loses the plot completely, shooting three hundred innocent allies and handcuffing her for presentation to Pike.

As relationships go, she thinks this could have gone better.

She holds it together by sheer force of will. She can't break over this disappointment. To be clear, though, she is very disappointed. She thought she knew him better than this. She thought she knew him well enough to swear that he couldn't be capable of anything so vile.

She starts drawing Lexa. Not because she's flighty and changeable, and has moved on from Bellamy so fast. But because Lexa decides that _blood must not have blood_ , and with that one sentence, she proves herself to be everything that Clarke hoped Bellamy was. Everything he has shown himself not to be, with his thoughtless, hurtful actions of late.

Drawing Lexa is different from drawing Bellamy. It's exciting, in some ways, because she is new and her face has a beauty all of its own.

As for loving Lexa, that's different too.

…...

Lexa is dead.

Lexa is dead, and now Clarke has no one.

She lost her father, Wells and Finn. She lost Lexa. And she lost Bellamy, too, for all that he's still breathing.

She wonders if she'll ever draw again.

…...

Clarke is still not in the mood for either smiling or drawing by the time she arrives at the cave where the rest of the resistance against ALIE are hiding out. She's fed up of having the fate of the human race rest on her shoulders, and she's fed up of losing everyone she cares about.

But then Bellamy sees her, and his lips quirk up at the corners – just the slightest, tiniest hint of a smile. He still looks angry, of course. His jaw is more tense than ever, and his face is battered and bruised, too. But that twitching of his mouth is enough to show her that, however furious he might be, he's still glad to see she's not dead.

It's a fascinating kind of a facial expression, she muses. Complex and challenging, much like Bellamy himself.

She thinks it's an expression that might be interesting to try to draw, one day. Just as soon as they've tackled the next crisis.

…...

Clarke has always aspired to make Bellamy smile, but she's never been much good at it. She can admit that to herself, now that they are truly reconciled and all is well on the way to returning to normal between them. They've talked it out, and hugged on a beach, and now they're saving the free will of humanity together.

All in a day's work, for the two of them.

So, yeah, she's still terrible at making him smile. He manages to make her day far more often than she lifts his mood, she's pretty sure. It makes her feel inadequate, somehow, and even more desperate to do better for his sake. Not just so that she has something pretty to draw, but because she thinks he deserves a bit more joy in his life.

She'll get on with that, just as soon as she's finished taking down ALIE. She supposes her mind ought to be on the mission, not on Bellamy's stupid beautiful face.

At least thinking about his face was distracting her from the fear. Now she's thinking solely about the task at hand, there is only anxiety, panic creeping fast up her throat until she's -

"Try doing that hanging upside down." Bellamy says, just at the moment she needs to hear it the most.

She gives him a tired quirking of her lips for his trouble. She'll do better at bringing him as much happiness as he brings her, really she will, just as soon as this is over and done with.

She ducks her head, ready to take the flame, and shoots out a hand to clasp his.

He's got nice hands. She's going to move onto drawing those, just as soon as she's finished perfecting his smile.

…...

She gets careless when the world is ending.

Now that she has only six months to capture the perfect Bellamy smile on paper, and she is still nowhere near achieving that, she is in so much of a rush to put the practice in that she stops prioritising secrecy quite so much. In particular, she adopts a distressing habit of drawing right in front of him, on the evenings they stay up late together in the Chancellor's office trying to solve impossible problems.

Tonight is one such night. Clarke is reviewing the medical inventory. Bellamy is trying to work out how much meat they have preserved, and is almost certainly going to arrive at the conclusion that it's not enough.

It's grim work, so she decides to have a go at lightening the load.

"What's the verdict? Are we going to be eating spiders for the next five years?" She asks him.

It works. It earns her a smile, tired but true. "It would take a lot of spiders to feed five hundred people."

"Have you been to the old viewing platform? There's enough spiders there to feed the whole of Arkadia."

He shakes his head, still smiling, some of that ever-present tension gradually draining away.

That's it. That's the moment she's been waiting for. She pulls her sketchbook towards her with all the subtlety she can muster, and in a flurry of pencil strokes she makes a start on the curve of his mouth.

"How's the medical inventory?" He asks, when she has been drawing in silence for a couple of moments.

She's not sure how to make him keep smiling with a medical inventory. "Fine." She answers, still desperately sketching away.

"Liar. You're not even looking at it. What are you drawing, anyway?"

"Nothing. A tree." She slams her sketchbook closed and tries for a more coherent answer. "There's a really interesting tree at the edge of the forest near Raven's Gate, have you seen it? It's grown slanted from the wind."

That ought to kill the mood. That ought to wipe the smile off his face and all trace of laughter from his eyes. No one in their right mind would still be overflowing with joy after some inane comment about _trees_ , she chastises herself sharply.

She's half right. He stops grinning, and he doesn't laugh. But his gaze as he looks at her is filled with such genuine warmth that she almost doesn't miss that smile.

…...

It happens again a week later. The two of them are sitting in the office, both preoccupied with tedious tasks that are unlikely to make much difference to their survival, but at least make them feel useful in the meantime.

They're clinging to that usefulness even more firmly today, Clarke thinks. Today is the day that Bellamy was supposed to bring back the hydrogenerator and instead brought back a load of freed prisoners they will not be able to save. She ought to be annoyed with him, but she's only absurdly tired. Tired, and relieved that he got home in one piece.

She's not sure she's going to earn many smiles from him today. He said something earlier about being on the other side of that door when the death wave comes, and she doesn't like it. She won't stand for it, in fact.

Bellamy Blake is going to survive Praimfaya. She'll make it happen, even if it's the last thing she ever does.

With that in mind, she renews her concentration on their oxygen calculations.

"Do you ever miss the dropship?" Bellamy asks, interrupting her task.

She doesn't mind the distraction. "All the time, yeah. It's stupid – I remember being so scared. But it was _small_ , you know? Only a hundred people to worry about. The worst thing that could go wrong was dying. Now, the worst thing that can go wrong is _everyone_ dying. The whole human race."

"We'll find a way." He tells her. It's almost a ritual by now – she expresses concern, he reassures her. It's what they do.

She nods, soothed at least a little by his encouragement, and gets back to her reading.

He speaks up again. "That wasn't what I meant. I meant – do you miss the laughter? Teenagers just being teenagers? The moonshine on Unity Day?"

"Sometimes." She swallows down nerves, tries for some honesty. "I miss you laughing. I mean – it's great having you here, like you are now. I know we can rely on each other, and it wasn't quite like that at the dropship. But you seemed happier back then."

He nods, incongruously serious for a conversation about happiness. "It was a different kind of happiness. There were no rules and my sister didn't get floated like I expected her to. But this – I think I'm about as happy as anyone could be, looking forward to the end of the world."

She knows that the glow in his eyes as he tells her that is something which cannot be captured on paper. She knows, but she pulls her sketchbook urgently towards her and gives it a try all the same.

…...

Things go wrong.

That's the story of her life, isn't it?

Things go wrong, and Bellamy's steady presence and tension-tinged smile see her through every twist and turn.

The time she spends in the lab testing the nightblood is beyond grim. But she gets through it, thanks to a stick of charcoal, and thanks to evenings spent sketching the relieved smile on Bellamy's face, the moment she pulled that truck safely to a halt before his anxious eyes.

…...

Things don't stop going wrong. Some of them are her fault, and she will bear the guilt for the rest of her days. But mostly they are just things that happen, and she gets caught up in events and bundled along from one impossible choice to the next. She hates feeling like she's not in control of her own life, and she's been feeling that way since the moment she set foot on the ground.

She's not even surprised when she finds herself waving a gun at Bellamy's face, as he goes to open the bunker door. She should have known it was heading this way sooner or later – another person she loves, another death on her conscience.

She can't do it, and that's that.

She's rather more surprised, mere hours later, when they are in a rover heading for the island and he seems prepared to forget all about what she thought she had to do.

"For the record, not shooting me was the right choice." He tells her, turning to her and grinning, looking for all the world as if this is some kind of joke.

It's no kind of joke at all. This is his _life_ they are talking about. For once in all the long months she has known him, she does not want to see Bellamy Blake smile.

"Stop it." She reprimands him smartly. "Eyes on the road."

"What?" He asks, even as he returns his concentration to his task.

"Stop smiling at me like that."

He's still smiling, a slant to his brow that tells her it's deliberate, now. It's an attempt to provoke her.

It works. Her self control has never been much good, where he is concerned.

"I don't deserve it." She tells him, angry with herself, and with him, too, for not being angry with her.

"Forgiveness isn't about what you deserve." He reminds her, words borrowed from the first friendly conversation they ever really had.

She shakes her head, but he's still smiling.

There is a moment of silence. She starts to relax. But then he speaks again and shatters her calm.

"I was just giving you something to draw." He says, tone teasing.

"I – you – _what_?"

"As far as I can tell it's mostly the smile you like to draw." He offers, tone light, with a shrug.

She gulps uselessly at air. She was expecting to face death today, but not embarrassment. At length, she manages to choke out some words. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to make you uncomfortable."

"You didn't." He assures her firmly. "I'm sorry for bringing it up. I just – yeah."

He lapses into silence. He spends a few minutes swerving around various grounders who spring into their path, his concentration firmly on the road. Clarke starts to wonder whether maybe that's it – the conversation is over, and they can forget that this humiliating exchange ever happened.

Then he proves her wrong. He whips the metaphorical carpet out from under her with one well-chosen sentence.

"If I was any good at drawing, I'd draw your smile too."

…...

They make it to the lab later than they would like. They haven't got time to get back to Polis. But they have got time to prepare the rocket carefully and thoroughly for an escape to space, and to wait for Monty and Harper to drive to join them, so that is what they do.

It is while they are trying to work out how much water they will need that Bellamy turns Clarke's world on its head for the second time today.

There's something she needs to say to him, just in case this should all go wrong. Just in case her mother's vision should prove true. So it is that she delivers some carefully prepared words, about the history she shares with Bellamy, and about how she would want him to carry on without her, if ever he had to leave her behind.

She finishes with a finger resting on his face. That wasn't part of the plan, but it seems to have happened anyway.

Her self-control is having a bad day, clearly. And then it crumbles only further, as she takes this last chance to do what she has waited months to try. She moves her hand, just a little, and traces her forefinger over his lips. She can't help it, somehow. She knows it's silly, but she's been dying to touch his smile from the very beginning.

Only he's not smiling, now. He's looking at her with his heart in his eyes and it's almost more than she can bear.

That's when he does it. That's when he presses a soft kiss to her fingertip.

She draws in a sharp breath, shocked and delighted, all at once. And then, before she has had even half a chance to gather her scattered wits, he is turning his face, rubbing his cheek against her hand.

And then he is kissing her palm.

"Bellamy -"

"Clarke." He whispers, just her name, but in a rather quelling tone.

She doesn't know who moves first. Maybe they both move together. But all at once, they're in each other's arms, and his lips are on hers and her hand is cradling the back of his neck.

Raven interrupts them, not unkindly.

"Finally! But you're going to have to save it. You've got five years to make out, but we need to get this rocket off the ground first."

…...

The first evening on the Ring is bizarre. There is simply no other way of looking at it. They are all safe, but grief-stricken and exhausted. They have lost Jasper, recently, and countless others before him. The Ring is home, in some ways, but in others it feels like they barely know this place, after the best part of a year on the ground.

Clarke isn't sure she knows how to be safe. She's out of practice at the art of peace, and doesn't understand how to rest and be thankful. So it is that, once the others have gone to bed, she and Bellamy sit and watch the Earth burn in taut silence.

She doesn't know what to say. She doesn't know anything much, in this moment, except that she and Bellamy are both alive. She's sure she'll be happy about that, just as soon as she's feeling less drained.

At length, Bellamy stands up, and reaches a hand out towards her.

"Come on." He says.

"Where to?"

"We need to find you a sketchbook."

She smiles at that, just a little. "I don't need a sketchbook right now. I'll find one once I've... adjusted to this."

He nods. "Yeah. Sure." A swallow. "I was just trying to make you happy." He tells the floor near his boots.

At once she is on her feet before him, searching his face. "You do make me happy. All the time. You don't need a sketchbook for that."

Suddenly a smile is splitting his face, genuine and open and above all, _relaxed_.

She frowns at him. "What is it? Why are you smiling? I didn't do anything."

He laughs, a bright, carefree sound. "It's not about what you _do_ , Clarke. It's about who you are. You're here, and you're safe, and apparently I make you happy. What else could I ask for?"

She stands, stunned, and stares at him for a moment. She never thought of it like that. She never allowed herself to even consider the possibility that he might feel like that about her – that her happiness might be all he needs to smile. It seems like all those months she spent trying to _earn_ his smiles were wasted, then.

No, not wasted. No time spent getting to know this man could possibly be time wasted.

It is Clarke who initiates the kiss this time, standing on her tiptoes and balancing herself with a hand on his shoulder as she reaches up to press her lips to his. He kisses her back with enthusiasm – or, at least, he tries to. He has to pull away, after a moment, because he's smiling too wide to make his mouth fit with hers.

She beams up at him. She's incapable of doing anything else. Sure, she left a lot of trauma behind on Earth, and she will need to process that, in time. But for now she damn well intends to leave that on the back burner and live in this moment with Bellamy.

"Hold that smile." She tells him firmly. "I have to go look for a pencil."

He laughs. "You've got five years to practise drawing me smiling, Clarke. Find a pencil in the morning."

Five years to practise drawing Bellamy's smile. She likes the sound of that.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!


End file.
